Sea of Dreams

  * * *

  Oh, I was warm. It felt good. I snuggled closer to my heat source, and suddenly, I could smell something masculine and heady. It was a combination of perspiration and spice and outdoors smell. Half-asleep, I didn’t even wonder at the origin. I had been in this position before. I had been held here in a comforting dream. It was a protected place and one that didn’t threaten me.

  I smiled sleepily and listened for the sounds that would reveal where I was. For the moment, my mind was still mostly lost in the throes of sleep. There weren’t the regular sounds of the camp – my bunk mates thumping out of their beds and struggling into cold clothing with barely repressed curses at the temperature. Outside wasn’t ringing with the sounds of people chopping wood or changing duties. Dimly, I perceived I wasn’t at the camp. Not being there didn’t really bother me either.

  Then there was a memory. Walking, or rather flying, in the dream world with the firefly pixies, came to me like a shot. It wasn’t exactly like a dream, and it wasn’t exactly like a memory, but a vivid twisting of both that seemed like a remarkable tale. I realized that I wasn’t in the cave because the cave wasn’t exactly warm. And the birds were chirping happily far above me.

  I grasped that I was inside a sleeping bag and that I was lying on the ground next to something that was very warm. For a split second, I was waking up on the side of a mountain, expecting to hear my father moving around nearby. It frightened me, and I jerked abruptly, forcing the thought away. It had been long before, and the time was over.

  Then there was the undeniable and distant trumpeting of a Big Mama as it coursed the redwood forest trail to the grasslands where they fed. I opened my eyes and saw a blue t-shirt. Sky blue. A pocket on the right side. No logo. I lifted my head and saw that the blue t-shirt was covering a broad chest. The muscular arms that came out of the shirt sleeves were wrapped around me. My thigh was lying across both of his. I lifted my head up further and saw, “Zach.” I breathed out his name like an accepting sigh.

  His eyes were open. The chocolate brown orbs were studying me broodingly. We were wrapped together in the sleeping bag. If I got any closer, I’d have to crawl inside his skin. And did I want to crawl inside his skin? Well, yes, I kind of did. That was weird. Really, really weird.

  “Thank you for the book and the candy bar,” I said inanely. Goober, I told myself.

  Zach appeared confused for a moment, and then he remembered what he’d left on my bunk some four days before. I guess it was his way of giving me jewelry and flowers, except not, or maybe I had just read too much into that.

  “Why didn’t you come out the front door, Sophie?” he asked instead of commenting on my thankfulness. He meant after I was done talking with Gideon and the steering committee. Because Zach had been waiting for me there, and I had known it.

  I looked into his eyes. “I wasn’t sure if I wanted to face you again,” I said truthfully. Slowly, I glanced away from him and saw that we were a few feet away from where I had fallen asleep. The pixies had brought him to me, and he had wrapped me up in the sleeping bag and then joined me. It wasn’t the first time we’d slept in the same bed. It wasn’t the first time he had held me comfortingly either. But it was the first time it felt different.

  “Ouch,” Zach said. “Why don’t you hit a guy when he’s down?” His face became grim. “I was worried sick about you, Sophie.” One of his big hands inched up and tenderly cupped the side of my face. “I thought…I thought that maybe it was him. That he’d come in the night and taken what he couldn’t get before. That he’d taken you away.”

  The warmth of Zach’s body didn’t hold a candle to the searing heat of his hand on my face. I wanted to tuck my face into the calloused flesh and just take in his distinct aroma. For hours, for days even. “The pixies,” I said slowly. “They had to tell me something important. Something critical to us and to them.”

  His hand caressed my face as if my words were irrelevant. “After I got here, you slept for hours,” he murmured. “Your skin was ice cold, but your breathing was normal. I couldn’t wake you up.”

  “The pixies did something to me,” I interjected.

  “I’ll say,” he said back. “For a moment I was certain that you were one of them.” He gave a little ironic laugh. Zach had been sure at that moment, but now in the bright light of morning with me alive, whole, and very human once again, he wasn’t so sure. How had he known? I wondered at what inner instinct told him that the pixie who had sat in his palm was not just any pixie.

  Did I want to say that I had been? Did I want to explain to him everything? Did I finally trust Zach? Yikes. I was in big trouble again. But it wasn’t the same kind of trouble that I was used to having. Yes, it was a whole NEW trouble. A four-lettered word kind of NEW trouble. Double yikes.

  “You died,” I blurted and then asked myself, Where the heck did that come from? Then I could hear Kara saying, “Explain why you drugged us.” And then, “Not to me. You have to explain to him, to Zach.”

  “I – what?” Zach said helplessly. His hand stilled on my face. “I didn’t die.”

  Now I was the helpless one. The right words didn’t want to seem to come from my mouth. Worse was that I couldn’t think of what the correct thing was to say. “The day that we saw the sign near Crescent City,” I said finally sputtering the words out. “The sign that said ‘You are not alone.’”

  Zach nodded at me, still trying to understand.

  “I saw it in my head,” I told him, my eyes fixed on him, willing him to comprehend me, willing him not to have doubt about what I was saying. “At the sign, you went to face the Burned Man alone, trying to protect me, and he killed you. That’s what I saw.”

  Bewilderment distorted his beautiful face. He was desperately trying to realize what I was saying. “You mean, something like the dreams I had of you, the dreams I have of you,” he corrected himself wryly. “It’s like that?”

  “It was a premonition,” I said firmly. “It would have happened. But I made it not happen.”

  “By drugging us,” Zach said incredulously. “You saved my life by slipping me a mickey?” His other hand cupped my other cheek, and he gave my head a little shake. His eyebrows slanted downward in a fierce glower of disapproval. “How did you know he wouldn’t kill you instead?”

  “I didn’t know. Not definitely,” I said honestly. “But I couldn’t allow you to die for me.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me before?” he asked insistently. “Why? I would have — ” His words cut off as he realized that he wouldn’t have listened to me. He wouldn’t have taken me seriously.

  “You were so angry with me,” I said. “I don’t think you would have believed me. You didn’t trust me to tell you the truth. Because of me not telling you when my shoulder ripped open again. Because it would have sounded so out of this world. Because it would have told you just too much for me to bear.”

  His eyes were like guided lasers shooting into the depths of my soul.

  Oh no! Me and my big, big, BIG mouth! There it was, out in the open, as open as it could be without me actually saying the words. I tried to move my head away, but he wouldn’t let me. His dear hands were bracketing my face just as he had done the first time he had kissed me. I could see that the wheels were turning around in his head.

  “You…care for me that much?” he asked delicately, framing the words as if he was building a house of cards. His tone was uber-carefully neutral. I think he was fighting with his normal urge to be sarcastic or to use words to his immediate advantage.

  I dropped my eyes to his chest. No one liked being rejected. I couldn’t see what the ultra-perfect Zach, four years older and wiser, would want with geeky, little paranoid teenager, Sophie. I didn’t compare to Lulu’s lush figure and adorable Cupid’s bow lips. I wasn’t tall and sleek and wonderfully groomed. I wasn’t a conversational whiz kid. I was irritable, close-mouthed, grieving, and obstinate.

  “And wonderfully stubborn,” he murmured as if he could r
ead my mind.

  “Oh, let me out,” I begged, starting to struggle to get out of the sleeping bag.

  “I can’t,” he said. My eyes lifted to his again. His face was so serious. The chocolate brown was filled with emotion and something I had never really seen there before. Had I really looked before? “If there’s one thing I’ve learned, Sophie. I can’t let you go. Don’t you understand that? I dreamed of you before the change. I would do anything for you. I’m not perfect. Sometimes we’re going to rub against each other like sandpaper and a match. But each day I spend without you is like a wound opening wider in my heart. Once you were only a dream. Then you were real.” His fingers caressed my cheeks, and I was frozen like a statue. “Mulish. Daring. Ready to go out on a limb and saw the branch off behind you. Devoted. Valiant. Beautiful. Breathtaking.”

  His face lowered to mine, his head tilting so that everything would fit just so. His soft lips touched mine. It was just a little spark of electricity and then a surge of power that shocked us both from the very top of our heads down to the bottom of our heels.

  I wanted to breathe him into my body, into my soul. My hands which had been clutching at his t-shirt inched up and joyfully wrapped themselves around his neck. Zach felt my capitulation, and his lips moved delightfully on mine, tasting me, sipping on me until I thought that the world had done a loop-the-loop while my eyes were closed.

  Finally, he pulled away, and his chest was heaving with an exertion that had nothing to do with exercise. I wasn’t exactly unaffected.

  Zach stared at me. I was half lying across his chest, my arms around his neck, and my head pulled back so that I could see his face.

  “But you’re so…” I said and stopped. Perfect was what I was going to say. So handsome. Like a male model from a magazine that I pretended I never read.

  “I’m not whatever it is that you’re afraid of,” he said softly. “I’m just me. A man. Just what we all are now. I don’t have a lot of fancy words for you or flowers or dates before which I ask your father’s permission to court you.”

  My face twisted ironically. “Sounded like some fancy words to me. Mulish. Valiant.” I paused. “Beautiful,” I added skeptically because I couldn’t believe that, even when it came from his lips that seemed so sincere.

  “You don’t believe you’re beautiful,” Zach asked disbelievingly. “You must know you’re gorgeous. But that’s only half of the attraction, no, not even a quarter of what I feel for you. There’s so much more, I’d have to write a book about it. Then I’d have to go back and revise it.”

  I laid my head down on his chest and sighed.

  “Slightly insecure,” he muttered, but it wasn’t like he was saying it was a bad thing, it was more like he was trying to remind himself that I was young.

  “Can we go?” I asked after a while. “I really need a bath and to change clothes and I need to tell everyone about the pixies, most especially you though.”

  I crawled out of the sleeping bag with Zach’s help and watched as he repacked everything. He made me drink a full sixteen ounces of water and eat a PowerBar before he’d let us go anywhere.

  As I finished my impromptu meal, he looked around the pretty little pool in the midst of the redwoods and shrugged. “Why here?”

  “This is where the firefly pixies live,” I answered and watched his jaw drop. “This is where they all live.” Then I sang to the pixies and watched several come flying out to greet Zach. They buzzed him cheerfully and then disappeared back into their hidey holes.

  Certainly, he had been led here by a flying horde of the pixies, and Zach had been so concerned with me, he hadn’t realized anything else about the locale. But as his jaw dropped further, I realized I had forgotten about my other surprise.

  “You can speak their language now,” he muttered.

  I smiled crookedly. “Apparently, they did that, too.”

  “What else did they do?”

  I stood and stretched aching muscles, thinking about flying, talks about Big Mamas, about being a protector, and about fulfilling destinies. “I’m still working on that,” I said understatedly.